Writer Of The Year Nominees

Welcome to the annual Secjuice Writer Of The Year awards, the most prestigious writers award in infosec whose winner is chosen exclusively by writers. I am very proud to introduce you to the nominees for the award and explain why they have been nominated.

Secjuice has more than 120+ active writers in our community (plus another 100+ members who have not yet published), they are mostly infosec researchers, analysts, practitioners, students and published authors. Every article they publish is ranked based on views, we even rank our writers in the same way, but when it comes to choosing a writer of the year, views and rank aren't everything!

Not every member of Secjuice has the time to write and publish as often as they would like. Some of our writers rarely publish, and because of that, fail to rank as highly as they should be ranking. Our rankings are also weighted against new writers who have to compete against established writers with more than 12 months worth of articles published on Secjuice, so it's tough to start from scratch and work your way to the top of our rankings. All of this means that some of our best writers often go mostly unnoticed because they simply aren't as visible as other writers.

The subject our writers choose to write about also skew the rankings, and I am a good example of this. I have comfortably ranked second place here at Secjuice for the last two years of the back of one article I wrote about a researcher being assaulted that gives me more than half of my views, and I have barely written an article all year. Our number one ranked article is by a writer who hasn't written in over two years, but he wrote a good comparison between two Linux variants that a lot of people seem to google for, meaning he gets an enormous number of views.

I can go on but you get the picture. Our article and writer ranks do not necessarily give you an insight into who the best writers here at Secjuice are. The only other metric that could perhaps be insightful here is our infosec writers challenge for new and emerging writers, the challenge winners are immortalized in our hall of fame after they have successfully completed the 'Triple Ten' by publishing ten articles, of no less than ten thousand words, that get at least 10k page views.

The writers challenge is a stepping stone into our writer's rankings, and gives new writers a fantastic goal to focus on as they hone their writing skills. Despite being a useful metric, it doesn't really help us decide who the writer of the year is.

We could put it out to the public vote, but there is always a danger that it could turn into a popularity contest on Twitter with the least popular writers coming out on top, and those with few followers losing out. In the end, the only people who are qualified to judge who the writer of the year are our writers themselves. We all know who the writers among us are because we all read each other's articles.

As the Editor-In-Chief here at Secjuice, I choose the list of writers that we vote on internally, primarily because I am the one person on team who always reads and edits everyone's articles and has done since day one, but also because I do not feel that it is right for me take part in this contest myself. I think it's better to let others shine.

I nominate the writers who I think should be considered and then our writers vote!

With that in mind, please meet our nominees for Secjuice Writer Of The Year:

The Nominees

Those nominated have ONE MONTH to prepare their last article of the year,  just over month left to tip the needle in their favor before we put things to the vote internally. Even if you are not a Secjuice member, as long as you are an infosec writer you too can vote on our Writer Of The Year, just let me know!

Andrea Menin - When it comes to this guy, you can ignore what I said about our rankings not reflecting who our best writers are! theMiddle is our number one ranked writer for good reason, he publishes research that everyone wants to read.

Sinwindie - The character known only as Sinwindie would be an OSINT Dark Lord if he wasn't such a nice guy and so tremendously helpful to the rest of the community. Whoever he is, he is one of best OSINT writers on the planet.

Mars Groves - A relative newcomer to the infosec space, but one of the most enthusiastic infosec people you are ever likely to meet. He is passionate about it and committed to learning everything he can, and his last two articles on HINAC were brilliant.

Shimon Braithwaite - Take one look at Shimon's writer's page and you will see that he writes about lots of different subjects out of the sheer love of writing. He writes brilliantly and with authority, easily one of our top writers here at Secjuice.

Chad Calease - Another one of our top writers, Chad regularly publishes well written articles on a wide range of different subjects. He is always refreshing to read and brings great perspective to any subject he writes about.

Gurkirat Singh - Infosec student Gurkirat is easily one of our most enthusiastic writers and regularly publishes articles on CTF challenges, technical walkthroughs, and also on his experience as a student of cybersecurity.

Alessandro Innocenzi - A classic example of a great infosec writer who does not get enough time to write as much as he would like, yet Alesanco's articles are always technically insightful, hugely informative, and well worth a read.

Tanzeel Akhtar - Professional financial journalist Tanzeel is unusual in that she sometimes writes about infosec even though her primary focus is finance, a rare example of a professional career journalist making a foray into cybersecurity.

Stuart Peck -  The candidate list wouldn't be complete without CyberSecStu and his pivotal "Unusual Journeys" series which shone a spotlight on different infosec professionals and told their story of getting into infosec, a true writer's legend.

Jamie Collier - One of the cleverest infosec cookies I have ever met and a delightful person to have a conversation with, Jamie is one person I expect to be someone one day if he isn't already. Rising infosec star!

Charlie Crane -  Secprentice is an infosec professional working as a blue teamer and brilliantly writing up his research and findings, Charlie is unusual, in that he has long been known as Secpentice, before he went public with his real name.

Miguel Calles - Founder of our weekly newsletter the Secjuice Squeeze, Miguel is a long term member of our leadership team, an infosec professional, expert on serverless architectures, and the author of Serverless Security published by Apress.

Nihad Hassan - Nihad is an experienced cybersecurity author with more than four infosec books published through Apress, and one of our most experienced OSINT writers and practitioners. Nihad has published a ton of great OSINT articles!

Andy From Italy - Andy has been a CTF write up legend throughout the course of this year and has published a LOT of HackTheBox.eu technical writeups designed to help others understand the challenges and how to crack them, a legend!

In order to come up with these names I took a month and reread everything that have ever written before arriving at the conclusion that they belonged on this list. This list does not include all of our writers who published this year, but it does include all the writers who I think have a chance at winning the title this year.

I wish all candidates the best of luck, it's not easy fighting your way to the top of the Secjuice pile, not in our rankings, our challenges or this contest, and you have all done well to make it this far. I want to thank all of you personally for helping make Secjuice what it is and contributing to our community with your time, knowledge, and experience helping junior writers hone their craft and publish their articles.

I am deeply proud of all of you and just glad that I do not have to choose a winner, I honestly would not know who to choose, you are all so good. Buena suerte!